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Making Light
by James P. Hogan
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Science Fiction

Fictionwise, Inc.
www.Fictionwise.com

Copyright ©1981 by James P. Hogan

First published in Stellar 7, August 1981

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

In his spacious office atop the Headquarters Building of the Celestial Construction Company Inc., the General Operations Director hummed to himself as he sat at his desk and scanned over Contract 13,700,000,000 B.C. The contract document was brief and straightforward and called for the creation of a standard Mark IV universe—plenty of light; the usual suns, planets, and moons; a few firmaments here and there with birds and animals on the land; fish-filled waters around the land. There was an attached schedule for accessories, spares for renewable resources, and some supporting services. Deadline for the contract was seven days—a piece of cake, the GOD told himself. Design Engineering Department's final proposal for the bid lay to one side of the desk in the form of a bulky folder that constituted the Works Order Review Document. Until final approvals were granted, the W.O.R.D. would be all that existed of the universe ... but it was a beginning.

What promised to make this project a little different from the previous Mark IV's, and somewhat more interesting, was the optional extra that Design Engineering had tagged on in the Appendix section of the proposal: “people.” Unlike the species that made up the usual mix of Mark IV animal forms, which simply consumed resources and multiplied until they achieved a balance with the environment, the people would have the capacity to harness fire, make tools, and generally think about how they could be better off. This would produce an awareness of needs and the motivation to do something about satisfying them. Eventually the people would discover that, as their numbers and their demands increased, they would no longer be able to satisfy their needs with the resources that came readily to hand. At that point, the reasoning went, they could simply give up; they could fight over what they had until it ran out, and then be obliged to give up anyway; or they could develop the intellectual potential inherent in their design and apply it to discovering the progression of new resources hidden around them like the successively more challenging, but at the same time more rewarding, clues of a treasure hunt. The way out of the maze lay in the third alternative.

Wood, growing all over the surface of the planets, would be the most obvious fuel following the taming of fire, but it wouldn't prove adequate for long. It would, however, enable the more easily mined metal ores—conveniently scattered on top of the crusts or not very far below—to be smelted and exploited to make the tools necessary for digging deeper to the coal. Coal would enable an industrial base to be set up for producing machines suitable for drilling and processing oil, which in turn would yield the more highly concentrated fuels essential for aircraft and rudimentary space vehicles. The scientific expertise that would emerge during this phase would be the key to unlocking nuclear energy, and the fission technologies thus brought into being would pave the way into fusion—initially using the deuterium from the special-formula oceans premixed for the purpose—and hence out to the stars and on to the advanced methods that would render resources effectively infinite for the lifetime of the universe. On planets set up for them in that way, and with brains that ought to be capable of figuring the rest out for themselves, the people would have a fair chance of winning the game.

What the purpose of the game was, Design Engineering hadn't said. The GOD suspected that it was more for their own amusement than anything else, but he hadn't objected since he was quite curious himself to find out how the people would handle the situation. A modicum of applied precognition could no doubt have revealed that.... But somehow it would have spoiled things.

He was still browsing over the last page of the contract when the phone rang with a peal of rising and falling chimes. It was Gabriel, the Vice President of Manufacturing. He sounded worried. “It's proposal number thirteen point seven billion B.C.,” he said. “I think we might have problems."

The GOD frowned. “I was just going through it. Looks fine to me. What's the problem?"

“Somebody from Equal Employment Opportunities Creation has been onto the Legal Department. They're objecting to DE's proposal for the people on the grounds that it would discriminate unfairly against the animals. I think we ought to get the department heads together to talk about it. How are you fixed?"

“Pretty clear for the next few millennia. When did you want to do it?"

“How about right now, while the large conference and congregation room's free?"

“Sure. Get the others over and I'll see you there in, say, ten minutes."

“Leave it to me."

The GOD replaced the phone, slipped the contract document inside the WORD folder, tucked the folder under his arm as he stood up from the desk, and began walking toward the door. Outside in the corridor he paused to pat the pockets of his suit and found he was out of holy smokes, so he made a slight detour to get a pack from the machine by the ascension and descension elevators.

* * * *

“EEOC says that we can't endow one species with that kind of intelligence,” the Head of the Legal Department explained across the gilt-edged conference table a quarter of an hour later. “Doing so would confer such an advantage that the animals would be guaranteed permanent second-class status with no opportunity to compete, which would constitute an infringement of rights."

“And we've been looking into some of the other implications,” another of the lawyers added. “The people would eventually assume a uniquely dominant role. That could set us up for an antitrust suit."

All heads turned toward the Chief Design Engineer. “Well, we can't take the intelligence away from the people,” he objected. “The physiques that we've specified don't give them any other means of survival. They'd have no chance. Then we'd still be in trouble with EEOC but with everything the other way around.” He threw his hands out impatiently. “And besides, it would defeat the purpose of the whole exercise. It was the addition of intelligence that was going to make this project more interesting."

“Why not make all the species equally intelligent?” somebody suggested.

The CDE shook his head. “We planned the ecology so that the animals would do most of the work for the people in the early phases and provide a lot of their food. If we made them equally intelligent, the situation would qualify as slavery and exploitation. We'd never get it past the Justice Department."

“And on top of that they'd all become eligible for education, sickness benefits, and retirement pensions,” the CDE's assistant pointed out. “HHS would never accept the commitment. They couldn't handle the load."

That was true, the GOD admitted as he thought about it. Already, the Department of Harps, Hallelujahs, and Salvation, had insisted that all guarantees of benefits be deleted from the proposal. And that had been just on account of the projected numbers of people, never mind all the animals. “So why can't we change things so the people don't have to depend on the animals at all?” he asked, at last looking up. “Let's make them strong enough to do all the work themselves, and have them just eat plants."

“Not that easy,” the CDE answered, shaking his head dubiously. “They'd have to be at least the size of elephants on an input of vegetable protein. Then food-gathering would become such a problem that they'd never have any time left over for mental development, which puts us back to square one.” He thought for a moment, then added, “Though it might work if we redesigned the food chain somehow."

The GOD looked over at the Head of Research. “What do you say to that?” he asked.

The scientist didn't appear too happy. He pinched his nose and reflected upon the question. “We'd have to figure it out again all the way down to the bacteria,” he replied after a while. “You're talking about a complete redesign, not just a few modifications. Setting up a whole new ecology and running it through the simulator is a long job. I don't think we could finish before the closing date on the bid, and that doesn't allow for having to rewrite the proposal from scratch. If we could use the new Infallible Biological Modeler we might have had a chance, but we can't. It's not up and running yet."

“I thought the IBM was supposed to have been installed last week,” the GOD said, sounding surprised.

“It was, but the systems angelists haven't handed it over yet,” the Research Chief replied. “They're not through exorcizing the bugs."

The GOD frowned down at the table in front of him. “Hell,” he muttered irritably.

“Er ... we don't say that here,” Gabriel reminded him politely.

“Oh, of course.” The GOD made an apologetic gesture and then cast his eyes around the table. “Does anyone else have any suggestions?” he invited. No one had. He sighed in resignation, then looked at the Chief Design Engineer. “I'm sorry, Chief, but it sounds as if we're stuck. I guess there's no choice but to drop the extras and revert to a standard Mark IV."

“No people?” The CDE sounded disappointed.

“No people,” the GOD confirmed. “It was a nice thought, but it's out of the question on the timescale of this contract. Keep working on it with Research, and maybe you'll have it all figured out in time for the next bid, huh?” The CDE nodded glumly.

The meeting ended shortly thereafter, and the Vice President of Sales went back to his office to begin drafting a revised Appendix section to be delivered to the customer by winged messenger. So the project wasn't going to be so interesting after all, the GOD reflected with a pang of regret as he collected his papers. But at least that meant there was less risk of overrunning on time and incurring penance clauses.

* * * *

The Chief Design Engineer was on the phone shortly after lunch the following day. “Have you heard?” he asked. He sounded distressed.

“Heard what?” the GOD answered.

“Feathers, Aviation, and Aquatics have been onto our legal people. They're trying to tell us that our birds and fish aren't safe."

“That's ridiculous! They're the same ones as we've always used. What's wrong with our birds and fish?"

“According to FAA regulations, all flight-control and navigation systems have to be duplicated,” the CDE said. “Our birds only have a single nervous system. Also, we're allowing them to fly over water without inflatable life jackets."

The GOD was completely taken aback. “What's gotten into them?” he demanded. “They've never complained about anything like that before."

“They've never really bothered to check the regulations before, but the controversy over the people has attracted their attention to this project,” the CDE told him. “Our legal people think they're all at it—all the angelcies are brushing the dust off manuals they've never looked at before and going through them with magnifying glasses. We could be in for some real hassles."

The GOD groaned. “But what do they want us to do? We can't go loading the birds up with all kinds of duplicated junk. Their power-weight ratios are critically balanced. They'd never get off the ground."

“I know that. But all the same it's regulations, and the FAA won't budge. They also say we have to fit bad-weather landing aids."

The GOD's patience snapped. “They don't fly in bad weather!” he yelled. “They just sit in the trees. If they don't fly, why do they need aids for landing? It'd be like putting life jackets on the camels."

“I know, I know, I know. But that's what the book says, and that's all the FAA's interested in."

“Can we do it?” the GOD asked when he had calmed down a little.

“Only with the penguins, the ostriches, and the others that walk. I called the FAA guy a couple of minutes ago and told him that the only way we could equip all the birds for bad-weather landing was by making them all walk. He said that sounded fine."

“I've never heard of anything so stupid! What's the point of having birds at all if they're only allowed to walk? We can't have planets with walking birds all over the place. The competition would die laughing."

“I know all that. I'm just telling you what the guy said."

A few seconds of silence went by. Then the GOD asked, “What's wrong with the fish?"

“The shallow-water species don't have coastal radar."

Pause.

“Is this some kind of joke?"

“I wish it were. They're serious all right."

The GOD shook his head in disbelief and slumped back in his chair. “Maybe we might just have to go along without birds and shallow-water fish this time,” he said at last. “Would the rest still work?"

“I'm not so sure it would,” the CDE replied. “The birds were supposed to spread seeds around to produce enough vegetation to support the herbivores. If we reduce the quotas of herbivores, we'd have to cut back on the carnivores, too. And without the birds to keep down the insects, we'd have the Forestry Cherubim on our backs for endangering the trees. With the trees in trouble and no shallow-water fish to clean up the garbage from the rivers, the whole ecosystem would break down. None of the animal species would be able to support themselves."

The GOD wrestled with the problem in his head. The CDE himself had precipitated the current crisis by introducing the idea of the people in the first place, but there would be nothing to be gained by starting rounds of recriminations and accusations at this point, he thought. What was important was to get the proposal into an acceptable form before the closing date. “The only thing I can think of is that if the animals become unable to support themselves, we'll have to put them all on welfare. If I call HHS and see if I can fix it, would that solve the problem?"

“Well ... yeah, I guess it would ... if you can fix it.” The CDE didn't sound too hopeful.

The GOD phoned the HHS Director a few minutes later and explained the situation. Would HHS accept a commitment to supplying welfare support for the animals?

“No way!” was the emphatic reply.

“What in he-heaven's name do you expect us to do?” the GOD demanded, shouting in exasperation. “How can we meet anybody's regulations when they always conflict with somebody else's?"

“That's not our problem,” the HHS Director stated bluntly. “Sorry."

Another meeting was called early the next morning to discuss the quandary. After all avenues had been explored, there seemed only one solution that would avoid all the conflicts: an azoic universe. All forms of living organisms would have to be deleted from the proposal. The meeting ended on a note of somber resignation.

* * * *

The Environmental Protection Angel was on the line later that afternoon. Her voice was shrill and piercing, grating on the GOD's nerves. “Without any plants at all, the levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur compounds from volcanic activity would exceed the permitted limits. The proposal as it stands is quite unacceptable. We would not be able to issue operating licenses for the volcanoes."

“But the limits were set to safeguard living organisms!” the GOD thundered. “We've scrapped them—all of them. There aren't any living organisms to be safeguarded."

“There is no clause in the regulations which specifically exempts lifeless planets,” the EPA told him primly. It was too much.

“What kind of lunatics are you?” the GOD raged into the phone. “You don't need a specific exemption. What do you need protective regulations for when there isn't anything to be protected? How stupid can you get? Any idiot could see that it doesn't apply here—any of it. You're all out of your minds."

“I'm simply doing my job, and I don't expect personal insults,” came the reply. “The standards are quite clear, and they must be met. Good day.” The line went dead.

The GOD conveyed the news to Design Engineering, who discussed it with Research. Without the volcanoes there wouldn't be enough planetary outgassing to form the atmospheres and oceans. Okay, the atmospheres and oceans would have to go. But the volcanoes were also intended to play a role in relieving the structural stresses and thermal buildups in the planetary crusts. How could that be taken care of without any volcanoes? Only by having more earthquakes to make up the difference, the CDE declared. The GOD told him to revise the proposal by deleting the volcanoes and making the crustal formations more earthquake-prone. Everybody agreed that the problem appeared at last to have been solved.

* * * *

The Department of Highlands, Undulations, and Deserts called the GOD a day later with an objection. “I'm dreadfully sorry, old chap, but we seem to have run into a bit of a problem,” the man from HUD told him. “You see, the mountain ranges you've proposed don't quite come up to the standards set out in our building codes for the increased level of seismic activity. We'd have no choice but to condemn them as unsafe, I'm afraid."

“What if we do away with the mountains, then?” the GOD growled sullenly.

“That would be perfectly satisfactory as far as we're concerned, but I rather suspect that you might still have a problem in getting it passed by the Occupational Safety and Health Angelcy. All those fissures opening up and landslides going on all over the place.... It would be a bit hazardous for the animals, wouldn't it?"

“But we've already gotten rid of the animals,” the GOD pointed out. “There won't be any."

“I see your point,” the man from HUD agreed amiably. “But it is still in the jolly old rules. You know how finicky those OSHA types can be. Just a friendly word in your ear. Frightfully sorry and all that."

The GOD was past arguing.

Design Engineering's response was to make the planets completely inactive. There would be no mountains, no fluid interiors, no mobile plates—in fact, no tectonic processes of any kind. The planets would be simply featureless balls of solid rock that could never by any stretch of the imagination be considered potentially hazardous to any living thing, whether one existed or not.

The Great Accounting Overseer didn't like it. “What do you need them for?” a GAO minion challenged a day later. “They don't serve any useful purpose at all. They're just a needless additional expense on the cost budget. Why not get rid of them completely?"

“They've got a point,” the CDE admitted when the GOD went over to Engineering to talk about it. “I guess the only reason we put them in is because that's the way we've always done it. Yeah ... I reckon we should strike them out. No planets."

But the Dispenser Of Energy wasn't happy about the idea of a universe consisting of nothing but stars. “It might be budgeted to last for billions of years, but it's still finite nevertheless,” an assistant of the DOE declared in a call to the GOD. “We are trying to encourage a policy of conservation, you know. This idea of having billions of stars just pouring out all that energy into empty space with none of it being used for anything at all ... well, it would be terribly wasteful and inefficient. I don't think we could possibly approve something like that."

“But it's just as we've always done it,” the GOD protested. “The planets never used more than a drop in the ocean. The difference isn't worth talking about."

“Quantitatively, yes, but I'm talking about a difference in principle,” the DOE assistant replied. “The waste was high in the earlier projects, but at least there was a reason in principle. This time there isn't any, and that does make a difference. We couldn't give this universe an approval stamp. Sorry."

A day later Design Engineering had come up with a way to conserve the energy: Instead of being concentrated into masses sufficiently dense to sustain fusion reactions and form stars, the stellar material would be dispersed evenly throughout space as clouds of dust and gas, in which the small amount of free energy that remained would be conserved through an equilibrium exchange between radiation and matter. The DOE was satisfied with that. Unfortunately, the EPA was not; the clouds of dust and gas would exceed the pollution limits.

With two days to go before the closing date for the bid, the GOD called all the department heads and senior technical staff members together to discuss the situation. The ensuing meeting went on all through the night. After running calculations through the computers several times, they at last came up with a solution they were sure had to be acceptable to everybody. Sales forwarded a revised final proposal to the customer, and the company waited nervously for the responses. Miraculously the phone on the GOD's desk didn't ring once all through the next day. The proposal was approved, and the final contract was awarded.

* * * *

Out at the construction site, Gabriel watched despondently as the project at last got under way. All that was left of the original plan was a pinpoint of exotic particles of matter, radiation, space, and time, all compressed together at a temperature of billions of degrees. The bizarre particles fell apart into protons, neutrons, electrons, muons, neutrinos, and photons, which after a while began clustering together through the radiation fluid as he watched. After the grandeur of the previous projects that he had witnessed, the sight was depressing. “I guess we just write this one off, forget about it, and file it away,” he murmured to the GOD, who was standing next to him. “It's not much to look at, is it? I can't see this even getting a mention in the report to the stockholders."

He turned his head to find that the GOD's eyes were twinkling mischievously. “What's funny?” he asked, puzzled.

The GOD tipped his yellow hard-hat to the back of his head and grinned in a conspiratorial kind of way as he scratched his forehead. “Don't worry about it,” he said quietly. “We've worked out a new method. It'll all come out just the way we planned ... everything."

Gabriel blinked at him in astonishment. “What are you talking about? How do you mean, everything? You don't mean the stars, the planets, the oceans, the mountains...” His voice trailed away as he saw the GOD nodding.

“And the birds, and the fish, and the animals, all the way through to the people,” the GOD told him confidently. “It'll turn out just the way we planned it in the original proposal."

Gabriel shook his head, nonplused. “But ... how?” He gestured at the expanding fireball, in which traces of helium and a few other light nuclei were beginning to appear. “How could it all come out of that?"

The GOD chuckled. “The research people developed some things called ‘Laws of Physics’ that they buried inside it. The angelcies will never find them. But they're in there, and they'll make it all happen just the way we planned. We ran the numbers through the IBM last night, and they work. You wait and see."

Gabriel looked over his shoulder at the site supervisor's hut and then gazed back at the embryo universe with a new respect. “I was going to go inside for a coffee,” he said. “But this sounds interesting. I think I'll hang around a little longer. I don't want to miss this."

The GOD smiled. “Oh, that's okay—you go get your coffee,” he said. “It will take a while yet."

END

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